Post-graduate Planning and Transition Year
20 Kearsarge Ave. Roxbury, MA 02119
Innovative Teaching Practices
In addition to using competency-based teaching and assessment practices to drive the curriculum and inform the learning that takes place at BDEA, faculty are constantly embracing new forms of teaching that address the student-centered nature of their work.
Blended Learning
We are thoughtful about how we are using technology to enhance learning, and hear from students that they need a balance of technology and personalized, teacher-led instruction. Our approach has been to create a blended learning model that combines a variety of options including online courses, as well as technology-supported classes enhanced by the use of iPads, Smartboards and computers. We have a Personalized Online Learning Lab (POLL) where students can catch up on classroom work or accelerate their progress through classes. But the bottom line is always having teachers available for support, direction, and conversatiion.
Active Learning
Active Learning takes many forms, from the expected inclusion of physical fitness into the everyday experience of our staff and students, to the authentic learning experience that results from theatrical movement classes taught by valued partners Actors' Shakespeare Project.
Our partners at Project Adventure helped us to understand and incorporate important aspects of "active" learning into our teaching practice, coaching students to physically "move through" diagrams instead of writing them on a whiteboard, and to use space rather than fill it.
Experiential Learning
For over a decade, BDEA has included Project Month as a way of turning all classes "experiential", and giving students--and teachers--an opportunity to collaborate on projects that become an enduring part of the whole-school community. One year, one of the projects turned an abaondoned community clubhouse into a solar powered, hydroponic greenhouse. Another year, students engaged with the "Occupy Boston" movement and recreated the experience of tent living, media coverage, and the genesis of the Arab Spring in a series of connecting classrooms at the school.
Every year, an exhausted staff ends the culminating Symposium night (when projects are unveiled for the community) by asking "Why we don't we do this all the time?."
So we are. In 2015, with the help of a grant from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Educaion, we piloted a two-block, team-taught, interdisciplinary, experiential classes as part of our curricular offerings to students. HipHop Nation combined Advanced History and Genre Writing and was a huge success. We are keeping HHN as a regular class and this year added HerStory, a team-tuaght double-block class combining Advanced Literature with Advanced History--with a femnist theme.